Moses
Give me your hand. We have to cross
the river and my strength fails me.
Hold me as if I were an abandoned package
in a wicker basket, a lump that moves
and cries in the twilight. Cross the river
with me. Even if this time the waters
don't part before us. Even if this time God
doesn't come to our aid and a flurry of arrows
riddles our backs. Even if there is no river.
Luis Alberto de Cuenca
Translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
what it means
There is an unnamed threat. Maybe a persecution, a war, but we are not safe here, and we need to escape. I ask you to help me make it to a new place and to come with me. Even if the story we are telling ourselves is not true in all its facts, it’s emotionally true; we need to escape.
We are as precious as Moses. We might not be named by God as important, but we are important.
why I like the poem
I feel so much love in this poem. That first line “give me your hand” is a command, but a command to be together. Same with “hold me.” I also really like this way of using the Bible. The writer assumes we all know about Moses being left in a basket in the bullrushes. The poem builds off that background knowledge.
craft
That last line blows my mind. You mean you are allowed to undercut the facts you just laid out? This is not the cop-out of “it was all a dream.” This is like the energy of being thrust off the earth into a new equally valid but much stranger space.
There’s also a lot of cool duplicating with variation in here. Like “We have to cross the river” becomes “cross the river with me” and the three “even ifs.”